- This topic is empty.
-
AuthorPosts
-
June 16, 2012 at 3:20 am #760954
kootchmanMemberBarclays and Nomura were both “backstopped” by the federal reserve. The Lehman Tarp was theirs to administer. Yes, paid off European and Asian banks holding Lehman securitized mortgage packages. Now paid. Yea DBP… we used to get the dime cards and had banking day.. civics. My father had one debt his entire life. A home mortgage. Every toy or car he ever bought was cash. The first home we owned as we joined the white exodus out of NYC to the “burbs”… 40% down payment and a 10 year mortgage.
June 16, 2012 at 4:06 am #760955
kootchmanMemberworldcitizen.. Clinton didn;t cave… I was around,.. he was out there with the pom poms, .. cheering away. China trade agreements , NAFTA, and Banking and Modernization all on his watch…. did he cave on everything” I voted for the little runt from Texas.
June 16, 2012 at 4:19 am #760956
DBPMemberSo do you know where that picture is from? Anybody?
June 16, 2012 at 6:24 am #760957
JanSParticipantisn’t it on the wall of the JP Morgan Chase bank at Calif. Ave. and SW Oregon?
June 16, 2012 at 4:28 pm #760958
DBPMemberYes that’s right, Jan. It’s a mural depicting old time “Bank Day” at school.
Â
On Bank Day, kids brought in their hard-earned pennies to be deposited into their own personal savings accounts. By so doing, they learned the values of thrift and delayed gratification, which were thought by our distant ancestors to be core elements of good citizenship.
Â
Every time I go by this mural I think of the extreme irony of this particular image being located in this particular place.
Thrift Day? Really? Here?
Oh, my. That’s rich!
Is this the same outfit that squandered millions in investors’ and depositers’ money on bad loans before being taken over by the government and dumped at fire sale prices? Are these the same people who even now are throwing away billions of dollars on the sketchiest of Wall Street Ponzi schemes?
Haw! Thrift indeed! If there was any kind of truth in art, this mural would depict not humble lambs in a 1930s classroom but rather million-dollar executives in a gilded corporate board room. And instead of putting their own hard-earned pennies into a savings account, they’d be shovelling piles of other people’s money onto the bonfire.
The word THRIFT would have to be painted over and replaced with something much more up to date, of course.
I know! How about GREED?
Or better yet . . . WASTE!
Â
Â
D’oh!!!
June 16, 2012 at 4:31 pm #760959
JanSParticipantthat mural has been up there for decades. It was done when Wamu was..well, better, I do believe. It’s just dumb luck that it’s now on a Chase bank….
June 16, 2012 at 4:35 pm #760960
DBPMemberJan, that’s exactly who I was speaking of in the first part of my comment.
Washington Mutual!
And yes. It WAS dumb. But it sure wasn’t luck.
June 16, 2012 at 7:10 pm #760961
miwsParticipantOkay, I know that JPMC now owns the building, and unless there’s some contract with the Junction Association, or the City, or some such, they’d be allowed to paint the mural over.
That being said, I think it would by totally unforgivable, and a huge (final) insult to the Seattle, and more specifically West Seattle community for them to do so.
And, yeah, what WAMU turned into, was the first insult to the fond memories of Washington Mutual’s Bank Day at Seattle Schools.
However, I personally, wouldn’t be at all opposed to jack-hammering that north wall off of the building, and having it displayed alongside the Rainier Beer red “R” sign, and other Seattle relics, at MOHAI…. ;-)
Mike
June 16, 2012 at 8:09 pm #760962
kootchmanMemberMakes as much sense as painting over the swimming hole mural where the Coleman pool is… .. it’s an historical depiction.. and if I am not mistaken it was part of an arts grant…. y’know… employing local muralists… I used to bank at WaMu until it started getting very strange…they were sending my foreign checks to Union Bank in CA to clear.. taking 30-45 days to clear. They closed about 6 month later. That was a big day in school…. and ya know… the PTA in PS33 used to give the teachers $5 in dimes so the poor kids would have something to put in their cards… they were paid to “clap the erasers” or help with the milk and snacks… so it didn’t feel like “charity”…. hmmmm
June 16, 2012 at 9:38 pm #760963
megMemberLast I looked, Lehman no longer exists. So, no. I don’t considered Lehman was “bailed out” in any sense of that term.
And in fact, if you consider THAT thing was Lehman’s bailout? Then ponder the fact that, unlike the rest of them, it was Lehman’s FINAL bailout, a distant relative to an FDIC receivership. I wish all of them had received their final.
Truth was, TARP’s welfare recipients had so much systemic risk with Lehman – their financial instruments deeply intertwined with Lehman’s. Most TARP recipients, though they received their own personal Treasury bailouts, would have collapsed anyway if Lehman holdings hadn’t been ‘administered carefully’ using, of course, borrowed funds cuz everyone knew the Lehman ship was going down.
“Money has been repaid, no wrong-doing here, no questions please.” Please. IMO, there’s a problem when America sees those noble bankers and financiers, all polished up in slick suits seeming to always end up on the right side of the law. Untouchable, in their brilliant maneuverings.
About the repeal of Glass Steagall in 99? For more than 2 decades before that happened, banks within the Federal Reserve System (working with whichever govt. power had control at the time in the 80s and 90s) had tweaked and used loopholes in Glass-Steagall to create exceptions allowing banks to have, first holding companies, affiliations, and then investment divisions, and finally their own securities operations. By the 90s that train was roaring on the tracks, and they were growing their affiliated investment divisions overseas, where regulations were even more lax… like in London – think, JPM’s. So by 1999, Gramm-Leach-Bliley-Clinton (all completely bought men) made legal on paper that which was already going on within endless legal loopholes… the demise of Glass-Steagall (which was so much more complicated, contradictory and obscure than I can understand). Clinton was still wrong to do it – they were all wrong. A few Congressionals at the time made speeches saying it was dangerous – but, their voices were barely heard. Reps and Dems are indistinguishable. The circus they create for us is…well, schizophrenic.
So, I have a question. What’s happening? I don’t mean, which party is right or wrong or whether we need religion or not. I mean, why did Kootch’s parent get a chance to make all the right decisions and lead a noble life of thrift? And why can’t today’s generation catch the same break?
June 17, 2012 at 12:48 am #760964
kootchmanMemberBecause today’s generation will never be able to accumulate the wealth to do so. We will be handing you a national debt worthy of any third world government.
June 17, 2012 at 3:45 pm #760965
redblackParticipantbecause the money that controls the system refuses to pay for government that protects us poor consuming saps down here at the bottom. we’re their batteries.
again, kootch, they – the people who are still making it hand over fist – could pay down that debt. they just don’t want to.
what did eisenhower and the dems do when debt was 125% of GDP?
still no answer?
June 17, 2012 at 7:47 pm #760966
megMemberThe debt. Yep, it’s a true horror and not a doubt about it. But, IMO, the debt is one of the consequences of the problem, and not the main underlying problem.
So, let’s see. David Stockman, formerly Budget Director under Reagan, says in 2012 we are in serious trouble. He says we’ve lost our Free Market and our Democracy. When? It happened when corporate interests gained aggressive access to government, in order to win advantages and reap rewards that are not available within capitalism in a democracy. Stockman says we now are in a Predator State, run by Rs and Ds. They are no longer ashamed to be seen in bed, on camera, rolling around and moaning with their naked corporate cronies (and other filthy livestock). And they no longer care about being blatant because the main st. circus is full on. All us impoverished players, with our tiny daggers, keep striking at one another’s tiny daggers, as if that was the problem.
“Your naked whore looks worse than my naked whore”. Really??? Tiny dagger. Paper cuts.
Stockman didn’t say that last part, starting with the bed scene but he strongly implies it. He does say we need a constitutional amendment (that’s a very serious thing to suggest btw) to cap campaign contributions at $100, and remove ALL Govt Access from corporate interests. You know, blow up K-Street? And the last part about removing corporate free speech is a problem in today’s corporate-personhood environment. However, we need a constitutional amendment to reverse it and reform campaign funding immediately.
Methinks, isn’t it strange how America scoffed at the Russians’ inability to stop big corporate government influence and we wondered how they remained so corrupt and weren’t really able to fulfill a true capitalistic democracy? It musta been all those years of communism and godlessness that made them incapable of democracy. Cuz across the water over here, we were a model of democracy and the free market.
Debt is a consequence of NO representation, of pillaging the peasants and then offering a few stale crumbs, to keep them playing circus.
June 17, 2012 at 10:35 pm #760967
DBPMemberYou’ve got a good analysis there, meg, but your stool is missing a leg: John Q. Public.
aka John Q. Investor
aka John Q. Pigeon
Without his willing participation in this scam, it never could’ve gotten off the ground.
I don’t know how old you are, but I remember — quite well — how the whole get-rich-quick thing was sold to the public. In the late ’80s, Wall Street was rebranded and repackaged for the little guy. We were told by the big wheeler-dealers that this was our big chance, and that if we didn’t get in on the game now we’d all be suckers. Conversely, if we did play the game, we could all be millionaires.
Well, people bought into it. Big time. —And why not? We could all see how fortunes were being made by the little guy every day — in everything from cell phones to sow bellies. We watched in awe as Bill Gates turned thousands of his co-nerds into millionaires overnight. We thrilled when we learned how country girl Hillary Clinton had made a hundred grand on a single IPO trade.
(Of course, there were a few who said they were disgusted by this orgy, but that was probably just sour grapes.)
By the mid-90s, seems like everybody and his uncle was getting rich in the market. Little old ladies were taking their money out of stagnant passbook savings accounts and putting it in mutual funds.
Why should you settle for a measly 5% return on your nest egg when you can get 10? Why settle for 10 when you can get 20?
Risk? Pshh! What’s that? Hell, if granny can take the risk, so can you!
Needless to say, with all this money flowing in to the game, the pot was looking very fat. Very fat indeed! And eventually it started to look as if all you had to do to win was play. It was like stock prices had forgotten how to go down or something.
Then along came the housing bubble.
Whhheeeeeeee!!!!
FAIL!
Everybody wanted to get rich quick, meg. And they greedily (or stupidly — take your pick) forgot that Wall Street has never been anything more than ONE BIG CRAP SHOOT.
Or rather, one big con.
With them as the mark.
Â
June 18, 2012 at 1:19 am #760968
kootchmanMemberOh, we got some hints there DPB… the first one was… the tech bubble … I pulled out of mutual funds and stayed out. Everyone indeed! The worst offenders? Take a look at the condition of public employee pensions. Was it sweet or what? CalPers, et al… denied unions nothing… they could give annualized raises of 5-7%… promise defined benefits plans, … except … they can’t. They didn’t have to tell the truth… and they didn’t have the assets to cover the promises.. Politicians loved it. We stopped investing. We started to speculate… holding stocks, not even caring if PE ratios were 40:1…. we felt rich.. we spent rich.. and when the housing bubble burst.. the average US citizen had a negative value, less than 2 months of reserves on hand, owed more on credit cards than they had in savings, borrowed against “equity” they didn’t really have, and then…. the federal government was like the barker trying to get you into a t—y bar…..people were taking out equity loans to buy stocks!!! If it goes up… it can come down…. there were hundreds of financial brokers out there saying loud and clear ”’ “tulip bulbs”….. now all that speculative wealth has vaporized cause it never was…. stocks are speculation, dividends are investments. You do the former with excess capital and a hight risk tolerance. Not with the kiddies college funds and your home as collateral. Dumbasses… and y’know… they blame the carnival owner…. what were you thinking when you walked into the tent? we learn this lesson every 75 year or so… with great regularity. It is stunning the assets you can get today with cash or good credit score… watcha want? Repo boats? Houses, Planes, Cars, … at maybe 20 cents on the dollar? .. some will benefit greatly from this downturn. The sooner we come to terms with it… clean it out, .. the faster it goes away. It’s like infrastructure… the clamor for it.. dude construction is so capital intense… it hardly makes a blip.. we aren’t going to put hundreds of thousands of construction workers back on the job… not unless you ban all the heavy equipment, hand out shovels and wheel barrows, drop wages to $10 per hour… and do it like the old CCC …. low cost, labor intense projects… not high cost capital intense… thats where the 1% will rake off the cream. Like or not.. the “equity of the middle class was shaved 40%…. ” the asset base they held is worth what is was 25 years ago. You can’t tax your way into prosperity with that base to support you. You cannot support 2012 government wages and benefits with an asset base that is worth what is was in 1978. It ain’t there.
June 18, 2012 at 1:36 am #760969
Genesee HillParticipantDang, Mr. Kootchman, I am happy you saved a lot of money gettin’ out of mutual funds in the nick of time. It must give you extra money to spend on Wa. State liquor, now that it is dirt cheap. Heheheh.
June 18, 2012 at 1:41 am #760970
kootchmanMemberNope.. I am good for another six months at least. Liquor is dirt cheap…. just not in WA…. Oregon is thrilled with the results. They are calling it the return of the great salmon runs…. I didn’t get out in the nick of time… I got hit. I never went back. I didn’t say I didn’t take a hit… but I never let a fund manager do my picking again. Costco tracks the purchases dude… they got to bite both sides of the apple… smarter than government every time.
June 18, 2012 at 4:56 pm #760971
megMemberYou’re right to point out the common guy participated and made it happen too, DBP. Oh, that millions of J. Does had just turned blind eyes in all directions to the Carnival thrust into the midst of our society and all over most the planet. A few did, and they are to be congratulated if they didn’t speculate or acquire an education, investments, a home, assets or a job that was ultimately tied in some way to the Carnival’s industry 1990s-2008. ‘Cuz they either resisted with huge effort, or they were very lucky for being older and already having ‘theirs’.
DBP, I would LOVE to see Wall Street treated as the giant CRAP SHOOT it is. For J Doe, this is generally true. She is unemployed and foreclosed or has no job future — all over the world. For “Too Big to Fail”, Wall St. gambling is NOT a crap shoot. OK? Lehman’s collapse was IT – that’s all we got. Only one biggie went down. That’s evidence we lack representation, my friend, and corporations have 99% of it. I’m not saying govt. should prop up the little guy or gal. I’m saying you failed to ‘Represent Us’. Represent our desire for social stability, for a place to raise our children. Govt. propped up a fire hose of extreme social inequality and injustice upon us.
Turning the channel to Europe, we can see what is at our doorstep. We have front row seats to what is coming. Grab the popcorn and watch. Local’s my hope for having a little control over my future.
June 18, 2012 at 6:17 pm #760972
megMemberKootch you are so right about this statement: “You cannot support 2012 government wages and benefits with an asset base that is worth what is was in 1978. It ain’t there.”
I saw something recently. “Collapse now. Avoid the rush.” Kinda sounds funny huh? But true. If nothing else does, then Reality will arrive and crater our expectations. Look no further than the scared Greeks.
June 19, 2012 at 2:29 am #760973
kootchmanMemberGreece will never recover. It can’t. It makes nothing, no industry, no agriculture.. and every Greek with assets left 30 years ago. while we still have the largest economy… and can recover.. you either do the reckoning now when you can have some control and some of the priority setting austerity requires. Or… we can be like Greece… we get what we get. And over 90 community banks were sold so far this year… the consolidation is getting worse. They can’t afford the regulations of Dodd Frank… they are selling. And the left clamors for more regulations still… as if more rules will solve the problems. More pablum for the carnival goers… regulations cost money. No one advocates non… but this orgy of the last three years is incredibly naive… and some think we don’t have enough. Sheep always feel more secure in paddocks. Even if the adjoining structure is the slaughter house.
June 19, 2012 at 1:28 pm #760974
redblackParticipantso, kootch, it kinda sounds like you want to roll back graham-leach-bliley. what gives? turning soft on me?
and DP is right: wall street is nothing but blind hucksterism. they’re not investing in anything anymore unless it benefits the board members of fortune 500 companies. we thought we had them well-heeled under FDR, but then along came shotgun ronnie and the deregulation posse.
remember the S&L scandals in the late ’80’s and the 1987 crash? average people lost their money, but did guys like neil bush go to jail? hell, no. did he get indicted? hell no. and to make matters worse, his dad got elected a year later.
and yet somehow 401k’s are better than pensions? for whom? certainly not wall street.
as a matter of fact, whose money do you think they blew in this latest crash? whose money were they using to buy all those junk bonds? why, only the biggest pools of the little guys’ money left on earth, of course: the public employee unions’ pension funds.
ye gods, man. why do you think those pension funds are broke?
but, kootch, man, don’t forget that this was all brught about by the reagan revolution. reagan – possibly the best barker wall street ever had.
June 19, 2012 at 5:44 pm #760975
megMemberBig pension funds (institutional investors) begged for the junk, some of which had been wrapped in false rating in order to get the safety seal. But, but. Institutional investors employ and staff well-paid risk officers and risk departments. What happened in those in-house risk assessments??
Oh, I know one thing that happened. Pension funds decided a long time ago that their birth right is at least 8%, the expected rate of return. They build their plans on it, and there’s no consideration of the question, what can happen so that we don’t get that? Ding ding! That question is the start of “risk assessment”.
June 19, 2012 at 8:16 pm #760976
kootchmanMemberNo, in the SNL scandal.. actually people did go to jail. But you bring up an excellent point. As I said over, and over, and over again… there are always two parties to a mortgage scam… one is your ever willing federal government… the other your friendly and corrupt banker/mortgage originator. Consider the SnL scandal a dress rehearsal for the Big One… the 79/80 crash. Banks found there was and abetting agent. who knew that Fannie and Freddie would step in and take over where Silverado left off.
Allow me to send a few excerpts.
The United States Congress granted all thrifts in 1980, including savings and loan associations, the power to make consumer and commercial loans and to issue transaction accounts. Designed to help the thrift industry retain its deposit base and to improve its profitability, the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act (DIDMCA) of 1980 allowed thrifts to make consumer loans up to 20 percent of their assets, issue credit cards, accept negotiable order of withdrawal (NOW) accounts from individuals and nonprofit organizations, and invest up to 20 percent of their assets in commercial real estate loans.
and
The damage to S&L operations led Congress to act, passing the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 (ERTA) in August 1981 and initiating the regulatory changes by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board allowing S&Ls to sell their mortgage loans and use the cash generated to seek better returns soon after enactment;[9] the losses created by the sales were to be amortized over the life of the loan, and any losses could also be offset against taxes paid over the preceding 10 years.[10] This all made S&Ls eager to sell their loans. The buyers—major Wall Street firms—were quick to take advantage of the S&Ls’ lack of expertise, buying at 60%-90% of value and then transforming the loans by bundling them as, effectively, government-backed bonds (by virtue of Ginnie Mae, Freddie Mac, or Fannie Mae guarantees). S&Ls were one group buying these bonds, holding $150 billion by 1986, and being charged substantial fees for the transactions.
A large number of S&L customers’ defaults and bankruptcies ensued, and the S&Ls that had overextended themselves were forced into insolvency proceedings themselves. The Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC), a federal government agency that insured S&L accounts in the same way the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insures commercial bank accounts, then had to repay all the depositors whose money was lost. From 1986 to 1989, FSLIC closed or otherwise resolved 296 institutions with total assets of $125 billion. An even more traumatic period followed, with the creation of the Resolution Trust Corporation in 1989 and that agency’s resolution by mid-1995 of an additional 747 thrifts.
Need I say it? Jimmy Carter was at the helm. It was the Carter Catastrophe, not the Regan Revolution my friend that gave birth… and to double down, we got the CRA, which would bring the house of cards tumbling down. Although.. to his credit RR didn;t whine for 4 years Carter did it , Carter did it… you might want to read the Economic Recovery Act of 1981… the well spring of the S and L crisis.
How many prosecutions has Holder initiated with his DOJ? None. How many bank board members have settled civil cases or criminla prosectuions? why that would be none too….
whenever the federal government takes the risk out of loans.. banks make riskier loans. The next house of cards to fall will be federal government student loans. That will be a one trillion hit, not a 180 billion hit.
June 19, 2012 at 8:25 pm #760977
miwsParticipantJune 19, 2012 at 8:35 pm #760978
kootchmanMemberYour pension funds are at risk… because the state, federal, and local governments rolled over on benefits plans. WA “asssumed” its pensions would get that 6-8 per cent annualized return .. so they gave out government worker contracts for pensions and benefits with no real basis in reality. Defined benefits. You say your pension fund is in good shape…. uh huh… we will see. It was a cheap and easy way to get union votes… except they never hit those targeted returns… and never will. Shortfalls are coming out of general revenues… on the backs of social services and social goods. It’s just like Greece… Spain… etc.. promises that are bigger than the ability of the economy to produce. wise up.
Do take note that the states deepest in the doo doo are? Blue states my friend.. blue states with the heaviest pension and benefits load. They need the same cuts and market adjustments that we taxpayers got hot with…. Ill is sitting on a pension shortfall that is larger than the entire scope of the savings and loan scandal. Sorta reminds me of the UAW… when they thought .. heck “GM can produce cars forever when each unit produced on the assembly line had about $6,000 in union benefits attached.” … looks like the couldn’t afterall …. enter taxpayer bailouts to “save” an industry… which hasn’t been saved and sure isn’t getting the same benefits today are they?
“ye gods, man. why do you think those pension funds are broke?”
Greed and vote buying.
-
AuthorPosts
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.